Myr > Recent Status Updates

excellent company for the ride up to Pittsburgh and back this weekend.

Third time's the charm on this one. Glad I stuck with it.

/ I have missed you, lightly, and at times, a great deal. I vacillated between the two binary worlds. /

"I run most errands for my mother because I do not want my mother to die and I don't want to fill my heart to the brim with regret."

I fear the end of this won't deliver, but I'm enjoying the telling of it.

"Slovik had done a good job with the Canadians: cooking potato pancakes, helping people attend funerals, dispensing [cigarettes] to weary German pilots. No doubt about it: Eddie Slovik was a damn goodhearted guy, do anything in the world for you. Anything, that is, except the duty to which he had been assigned." I am appreciating how Huie builds the world and fills in the context of Slovik's life & eventual death.

"The will of a so-called free nation like the United States is determined and executed by many different agencies and persons. Sometimes the community will be what a policeman says it is. Sometimes it's what a tax collector says it is. Or what the head of a senatorial investigating committee says it is. Or what the President says it is. Or what the nine members of the Supreme Court say it is."

"But the special thing about queer people is that even though we scavenge for crumbs, we're also the ones who leave them in our wake. A glance. A button. A cheeky reference. A subtle lyric. You can try to make us disappear, but we find ourselves in one another again, and again, and again."

"Film theorist Andrew Scahill says that queer spectators learn to be scavengers. I believe this is true and that we learn to scavenge early on. We read queerness into characters who are outcasts, who dress differently, who are bullied. We read queerness into that which is desperate, liminal - into monsters and ghosts if we have to. I spent adolescence hungry and aching, craving some mirror-morsel of myself."

...

the behavior of the two narrators in this book is so maddening that I am throwing in the towel with 90 minutes left in the audiobook. just awful.

I don't think I've been more frustrated with two narrators in my entire life. This book is going to get 2 stars because I am so annoyed with all the characters that I have to see how it ends, but I am not excited about it.

"The reality of having mothers like ours is that the only possible reprieve from worrying about finding them dead is them dying. As long as they are alive, the threat that they might die persists. Of course, anyone's mother can die, but this is different. In this case they might not have if we had just argued with them to take their medicine or if we ran into their house faster and got inside in time."

Was inspired to pick up the book after binge-watching the show. While they share a central premise, turns out the show deviated a good bit in how it built out the mystery. Still, this is a fast-paced read and I'm enjoying the author's sense of place and all the very specific DC location references.

Interesting how many things we learn in the first 300 pages here that we did not learn until the 2nd film of new series.

This has been a struggle to read, and not for the any of the reasons I usually say so - e,g, something's poorly written, the characters are thin and I don't care about them, the narration is inaccessible, etc. This book is well narrated (aside from the fact it's clear the narrator has never actually heard the theme song to the 90s animated X-Men) and well written. It's often funny. But there's just so much misery.

I have to thank a Percy Jackson & The Olympians podcast for putting me on to this book. Beautifully written by Madeline Miller and just as beautifully read by Perdita Weeks. (I gather Disney's PJO series has lots of us looking for more mythology inspired fiction as I didn't finish this before it was due back to the library and I now have at least a four week wait for it to come around again.)

Might need to create a "I may finish this some day, but clearly not any time soon" shelf....